All Chapters of I Left Broken and Fat, I Came Back His Boss With Triplets: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

42 Chapters

CHAPTER ONE: The Dress, The Gala, and The Beginning of the End

I LEFT BROKEN AND FAT, I CAME BACK HIS BOSS WITH TRIPLET HEIRSEmma's POVHere is something nobody tells you about being the fat wife of a billionaire.The staff learn his coffee order on Day One.They learn yours somewhere around month nine, if you remind them enough times, and even then they occasionally get it wrong and look at you like the inconvenience is somehow yours for having preferences at all.I have been Mrs. Liam Carson for fourteen months, three weeks, and four days, and the housekeeper still calls me Miss when she thinks I am out of earshot.I am never out of earshot.Being overlooked has taught me to listen extremely well.Anyway...Tonight is the Harrington Gala, which is the social event of the Los Angeles calendar and therefore the most important night of Liam's year, which means by extension it is the most important night of mine, which means I have done something deeply optimistic and bought the most beautiful dress I have ever owned in my life.Emerald green. Floo

CHAPTER TWO: Divorce And A Key

Emma's POV I do not sleep.I lie in that bed and do what I have quietly mastered over fourteen months, which is existing in complete stillness while approximately nine thousand things happen loudly inside my chest, and I stare at the ceiling and I think about heels on my hardwood floor and a tap running and a laugh I was not supposed to hear.At six forty-three I get up because lying there has a poor return on investment and I learned that lesson around month four.The apartment looks exactly as it always looks in the morning. Beautiful. Expensive. About as welcoming as a waiting room for people too rich to wait for anything. I put the kettle on and stand at the counter and think, not for the first time, about what it would feel like to stand in a kitchen that is actually mine.Footsteps.Liam walks in already dressed. Jacket on. The version of himself he presents to the world. He goes to the coffee machine, which has his order memorized, pours a cup, and stands at the counter with hi

CHAPTER THREE: The Guest Room

Emma's POVThe guest room door is slightly open.It is always slightly open. Liam never fully closes doors he considers temporarily his, like he is leaving himself an exit route in every room he occupies, which honestly tracks.I push it open and stand in the doorway.It smells like his cologne in here. That expensive, understated scent that I once found attractive and have spent the last six months finding quietly maddening, the way you feel about a song that was playing during a bad experience.I am not sure what I have come in here for.Something to do, maybe. Somewhere to put the restlessness while I wait for my mother and try not to think about the divorce or Talia's key or the three things sitting on my nightstand like exhibits at a trial nobody invited me to.I start opening drawers.Not snooping, exactly. Just looking around. In fourteen months I have never once come in here searching through his things because I have always been the kind of woman who would rather not look too

CHAPTER FOUR: Four Tests And A Kitchen Floor

Emma's POVMy mother arrives at two in the afternoon with an overnight bag, a casserole dish that smells like something that can fix most things, and the expression of a woman who has been waiting for this phone call for considerably longer than she is ever going to say out loud.She walks in and looks around at the clean surfaces and the expensive furniture and the art on the walls I have never chosen, and she sets the casserole dish down on the counter and opens her arms.I walk straight into them.She holds on for a while without saying anything and I press my face into her shoulder and let out a breath that feels like it has been stored behind my ribs for most of the past year."He said it over coffee," I say into her shoulder. "Like he was cancelling a subscription.""I know, sweetheart.""Talia had a key, Mom. She came here this morning. With a key."My mother's hand goes still on my back for a moment."Of course she did," she replies, in the tone of someone who is not remotely s

CHAPTER FIVE: The Number

Emma's POVI am in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house in San Diego by Sunday evening, which is a sentence I have not expected to be true at twenty-six, but here we are.The room still has the same curtains from when I was seventeen and a bookshelf full of books I have read so many times the spines have given up, and I am lying on the bed staring at the ceiling and trying to decide whether the nausea sitting under my ribs is anxiety or something else entirely.Three weeks pass this way.I sign everything Liam's lawyer sends over. Every page. Every clause. Every generous line item written in the specific language of a man who wants a clean divorce and is willing to pay for the cleanness. I do not negotiate. I do not push back. I do not ask for more than what is offered because more than what is offered would require me to still be in contact with him and I am done being in contact with him.My mother watches me sign each document with the specific silence of a woman who has opinio

CHAPTER SIX: Paris

Emma's POVParis is nothing like I expect and exactly like I need.I land on a Tuesday morning in October with two suitcases, a carry-on, a body that is doing approximately forty-seven things I have not authorised, and the specific brand of terrified that masquerades as calm if you hold it right.The airport is loud and fast and completely indifferent to the fact that I am twenty-six years old, newly divorced, secretly pregnant, and have just moved to a country where I speak the language at a level my high school French teacher would generously describe as enthusiastic.Nobody looks at me twice.It is the most invisible I have ever felt.It is the most free I have ever felt.Those two things, I am realising, are the same thing, and that realisation alone feels worth the plane ticket.I stand at the baggage carousel and watch my suitcases come around and think about the last time I was at an airport. Eight months ago, flying back from New York with Liam after a conference where I had sp

CHAPTER SEVEN: Bellamy Inc

Emma's POVThe first contract is small.A French textile company, family owned, three generations deep, currently losing money in ways that are entirely preventable if someone who knows what they are looking at would just look at it. They find me through a mutual contact of my mother's cousin who knows someone who knows someone, which is the least glamorous origin story for a business relationship I can imagine, but here we are.I know nothing about textiles.I learn everything about textiles.I spend three weeks reading everything I can find, making calls to industry contacts who have no particular reason to talk to me but do anyway because I ask the right questions in the right order, and I sit at my secondhand kitchen table with my laptop and three different reference books and a French dictionary and the specific focused energy of a woman who has something to prove and is only just beginning to understand that the person she is proving it to is herself.I write a restructuring plan

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Chamomile Tea

Liam's POVSingapore is where I do my best thinking.That is what I have always told myself.There is something about the specific quality of a hotel room in a city where nobody knows me, the twelve-hour time difference from Los Angeles, the way the humidity presses against the windows in the morning like it is trying to get in. I sleep well here. I have always slept well here.I do not sleep well tonight.I do not sleep well the night after either.By the third night I have stopped pretending it is the flight.I am forty minutes into a briefing document on Wednesday morning when room service arrives with my breakfast order and I sign the tab without looking and the attendant leaves and I lift the silver cover off the tray and there is a small white pot of tea sitting next to my coffee.Chamomile.I did not order chamomile.I look at it for a moment. Then I pick up the phone and call downstairs and say, very politely, that there has been a mistake with my order.The woman at the other

CHAPTER NINE: Three

Emma's POVI am six months along by the time it happens.Bellamy Inc has three clients now. The Beaumont contract has led to two others, both by referral, both signed in meeting rooms above French factories with men who read to page eleven and then set the folder down and looked at me differently.I work in the mornings from the kitchen table.I work in the evenings when the baby, who I do not yet know is three babies, has settled into whatever it is doing in there that makes my entire midsection feel like a small and very active committee meeting.I am getting larger in a way that is difficult to ignore and easy to misread, which works in my favour at this stage because I am not ready to explain, I am not sure I will ever be fully ready to explain, and Paris is a city that minds its own business about a woman eating croissants alone at a café table with her coat buttoned.My mother calls every Sunday."How are you feeling?" she asks, which means the pregnancy."Large and round.""You

CHAPTER TEN: The Morning Three People Arrived

Emma's POVMy waters break at three seventeen in the morning on the fourteenth of February.I know the exact time because I look at the clock on my nightstand and I make myself say the number out loud, three seventeen, because I have read that in emergencies it helps to name specific things to keep yourself from panicking, and I say it out loud in my dark bedroom in Paris and it does not particularly help but I say it anyway.My mother is in the guest room down the hall.She has been in the guest room down the hall for six weeks.She arrived in early January with three suitcases and the specific expression of a woman who is not asking for permission to stay through whatever comes next, and she has been sleeping across the hall from me and cooking things I did not know I wanted and being present in the exact quantity I have needed her without ever making me feel managed.I walk to the guest room.I open the door.She is already sitting up in bed."Now?" she asks."Now."She is out of be

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